Early Prediction of Covid-19 Samples from Chest X-ray Images using Deep Learning Approach

Aims: In this study, chest X-ray (CXR) and computed tomography (CT) images are used to analyse and detect COVID-19 using an unsupervised deep learning-based feature fusion approach. Background: The reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test, which has a reduced viral load, sampling error, etc., is used to detect COVID-19, which has sickened millions of people worldwide. It is possible to check chest X-rays and computed tomography scans because the majority of infected persons have lung infections. The COVID-19 diagnosis can be made early using both CT and CXR imaging modalities, which is an alternative to the RT-PCR test. Objective: The manual diagnosis of CXR pictures and CT scans is labor and time-intensive. Many AI-based solutions are being investigated to tackle this problem, including deep learning-based detection models, which can be utilized to assist the radiologist in making a more accurate diagnosis. However, because of the demand for specialized knowledge and high annotation costs, the amount of annotated data available for COVID-19 identification is constrained. Additionally, the majority of current cutting-edge deep learning-based detection models use supervised learning techniques. Because a tagged dataset is not required, we have investigated various unsupervised learning models for COVID-19 identification in this work. Methods: In this study, we suggest a COVID-19 detection method based on unsupervised deep learning that makes use of the feature fusion technique to improve performance. Based on this an automated CNN model is built for the detection of COVID-19 samples from healthy and pneumonic cases using chest X-ray images. Results: This model has scored an accuracy of about 99% for the classification between covid positive and covid negative. Based on this result further classification will be done for pneumonic and non-pneumonic which has scored an accuracy of 94%. Conclusion: On both datasets, the COVID-19 detection method based on feature fusion and deep unsupervised learning showed promising results. Additionally, it outperforms four well-known unsupervised methods already in use.